James Joyce’s Epistolary Poetry

James Joyce’s Epistolary Poetry

Jessica Marian (University of Melbourne)

• Wednesday 11 March, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

James Joyce was a prolific writer and sender of postcards, and as Bradley Clissold has recently noted, “postcard poetry was one of [his] favourite things to exchange between corresponding friends” (2023, 168). Yet the occasional poetry found within Joyce’s personal correspondence is dispersed and poorly catalogued and remains largely unexamined within Joyce scholarship. These poetic fragments offer insight into Joyce’s use of poetic language in intimate, ephemeral, and ‘everyday’ contexts. In this seminar we will read and reflect on some of these more informal poetic compositions, considering their rhetorical function, tone, and style, while also situating them within the broadening horizons of Joyce’s daily life and social world, the materiality of the postcard, and epistolary modernisms.

Jessica Marian

Jessica Marian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English at the University of Melbourne. Her research centres on the relationship between ideas and institutions in twentieth-century literature and theory, with a specific focus on periodicals, the genre of the essay, catalogues, and the modernist bookstore. Her work has appeared in Angelaki, New Literary History, Parrhesia, Australian Humanities Review, and Australian Literary Studies. In 2025 she was a Visiting Researcher at the University of California Los Angeles and recipient of the Dr John Bishop Memorial Visiting Scholar Fund award to visit the Joyce archive at the University of Buffalo. In 2026 she will take up the McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.